I took a break today from my work at Sticky building a website for a major sports apparel company that cannot be named, for DrupalCampPDX. Ben Kaplan and I did the keynote presentation this morning which was definitely an honor. I followed that up with a panel on best development practices which was a bit unplanned but went really well. This afternoon I'm doing a presentation on Views2 and Panels2, I'm a little freaked out on that since I've done zero preparation at this point.

Almost done with classes for the term. Got to do the presentation for my Capstone class tonight. I think next weekend I'm going to try to get down to Reno for the StickerGuy 15th Anniversary. I worked at StickerGuy in Chris McClendon place while he when went on tour back in 2000-something. It wasn't a good experience at the time but as Mr. Bynum always said:

"You either have good times or good stories."

And, at this point, they're good stories. So it'd be good to get down to Reno, see some old friends and bands that I hardly remember. I've gotta say that I'm most excited about seeing The Atomiks, The Scurvy Bastards, and Dragonfire -- the first two because they're great bands the latter because of this video I found on StickerGuy's MySpage:

Update: I totally forgot to mention that my little brother Charles and his friends Petar and Chuck are coming up this weekend. Petar wanted to see Agalloch play tomorrow night and I owe him big for helping me find a place to stay in Boston during DrupalCon. Should be a good time.

Made it out to Boston last night. I'd gotten upgraded to business class on the flight from Portland to NYC which was a nice treat. NYC to Boston in coach was a bit of a blow to my ego but the scenery made up for it. The highlight of the flight was looking out the window and seeing a white speck fly by, it was three white balloons. As the sun set we were flying through a beautify pink mist.

I'm staying with a friend of my brother's friends. Great place but it's an hour away from the conference center by train/bus so I was up early this morning. I've got a nice tickle in my throat so I hope I don't end up sick.

Here's the presentations I'm hoping to hit today:

• 09:00 Drupal Multimedia
• 13:30 Converting mock-ups to Drupal themes
• 14:30 What's in a Theme: The power of enterprise-level theming
• 15:30Design on the Edge of Drupal

I still haven't found a decent replacement for Oink after it got shut down... or at least one that I can get an invite to. Do I have any sugar daddies (or mammas) out there that want to hook me up with an invite to waffles.fm or STMusic?

Update: got an STMusic invite!

I've grown increasingly annoyed at Java over the years. I've taken to describing the language designer's philosophy as "If there's two ways of doing anything, pick the one that involves more typing".

All I want to do in take an array of numbers and convert it into a comma separated list, e.g. 1,2,3,4. Most modern languages make this easy:

• PHP: implode(',', $data)
• Perl: join(",", $data)
• Python: ",".join(data)
• Ruby: data.join(",")
• .Net: String.Join(",", data)

So how do you do it in Java? Well there's no built in method so you end up getting to write your own:

Been keeping busy. The dog keeps getting bigger and smarter. She's able to jump over the baby gates I've been using to pen her in the kitchen. She's also figured out how to stretch up and reach the counter so she can steal treats off of it while I'm not looking. But she's a great dog and I love her even when she is being a jerk.

Nick from NYC was out to visit last week. We had a good time and he was able to get all his stuff out of the basement of the old Russell Street house and mail it home. One of the highlights for me was last Friday when I hosted, what my friend Asia termed, Drew's Brews. Basically I invited a bunch of people over to help me drink the four gallons of porter that Steven and I brewed up. I'm hoping to repeat it again this weekend with a batch of pale ale.

This evening I went to Ignite Portland at the Bagdad Theater with Nick's friend Ingrid (who has a nice food blog). I was really impressed with the event, the speakers with the except the snake oil peddler who was trying to convince everyone that biodiesel is going to save us from our energy problems were all wonderful. I had a hard time picking favorites (though the history of the stick figure and why Germany loves David Hasselhoff stand out in my mind). I can't wait for the next one.

I just finished reading Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder. I'd read the prequel, Sun of Suns, last New Year's and loved it. I don't have the words to describe how amazing these books are. I'm just awestruck at the way he's able to construct a space opera that's convincing at every level; from the cloak and dagger intrigue of politics to the physics of constructing a city on the inside of a cylinder floating in air. In many ways it reminds me of the sweeping imagination and vision of the first Matrix movie (the big difference being that this sequel didn't suck).

It's been a while since I posted anything here. I'm a fan of bulleted lists so I'll just resort to one of those.

• Went to New York City. Stayed from Christmas to the 3rd and had a nice New Year's. Etta and I had some pretty major drama leading to...
• An un-engagement and break-up. No need to worry about planning a wedding now. Still need to call all the relatives... That said we're still talking, maybe we'll end up out on a date this weekend. What happens with Shasta and the house are open questions.
• Got a MacBook. The trusty old ThinkPad died. I'd sworn I wouldn't buy a Mac until they had a trackpad that you could right click. Someone had convinced me that the new Macs had two separate buttons in their trackpad but you and to enable the right clicking. Turns out they were full of shit and I'm left ctrl+clicking but it's still the best laptop I've ever owned. If you like UNIX then MacPorts.org is your new best friend.
• Booked a ticket to DruaplCon Boston. I used some frequent flyer miles. I don't have a place to stay or conference reservation but that kind of thing works itself out. When I went to the BeOS Developers Convention in Palo Alto back in '99 I ran out of money for a hotel room and slept in a park in the rain. I'm hoping to crash on someone's hotel room floor this time.

I ordered one of the OLPC laptops through the G1G1 program back in November and after some miscommunication from the OLPC and screwups by FedEX it finally arrived. Several things--like opening it or connecting to a network--have been non-obvious but I'm pretty impressed overall. The keyboard is tiny.

I lost my cell phone last week. No idea where it went, probably in pieces in a gutter someplace. After seeing what a new, "cheap" phone was going to cost I said fuck it and threw down on a BlackBerry Pearl. After loading up the GMail and Google Talk apps I've gotta say it's the best phone I've ever owned. It's got a great interface and I'm sure I'll get used to their keyboard soon enough.

Etta and I picked up our new puppy from the Oregon Humane Society today. Her new name is Shasta and OH MY FING GOD IS SHE CUTE!

As you can probably see my feet are pretty beat up... if you can't see that then click on the photo and check out the bigger version of Flickr. I won't claim to have run all 26 miles but I did move myself under my own power without using any wheels.

My half-marathon time was probably pretty good. I think I actually beat Etta to that point. She whooped up on me in the second half. I walked a big part of it and I think she finished a half hour or so ahead of me. I really don't remember what my final time was, I managed a sprint for the last three blocks and about all I could see was the orange timing pad I had to cross and Etta smiling at me. It was great having her there waiting for me. There's no way that I could or would have done this without her. And now I never have to run again.

Update: our times are posted: #3938 #3939

I do so much better when I've got a full schedule. When the day is wide open it's so easy for me to just put things off. The two big time eaters are school starting up, and buying a house with Etta and her mom. School's the normal pain in the ass, but with only two semesters left it's easy to be motivated. The house has been cool because I'm learning a bunch.

Tomorrow morning I'm going out to do the Helvetia Half Marathon. Etta was supposed to do it with me but she's come down with a bug so I'll be on my own. I go back and forth between kind of enjoying running and thinking it's a pretty dumb idea. I'm sure tomorrow I'll experience the full range of feelings on that topic.

Update: The results have been posted. I didn't do too badly:

This is one of my favorite flash videos. You might need to watch it ten times before you really appreciate it.

Oh my am I tired. Etta and i got up at 6am to go for a nine mile run. The weather was great and I was finally dressed properly for it. Last week I'd done a really bad job of pacing myself and spent the last two miles dieing. Today I said that I'd try to run with Etta the whole time. It went pretty well but at about the six mile mark my knees were bothering me I realized that I needed to open it up a bit. She did a surprisingly good job of keeping up with me. When we got back we both felt surprisingly good, until we realized we'd left the keys in the car. Etta;s mom was nice enough to pick us up and take us home to get the keys and then take us over for breakfast. And then pay for it when we realized we'd left our wallets in the car too.

Update: turns out there was a screw up in the route they gave. We only did 8 miles.